Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Joe Biden
hit home early with a plaintive plea: “Stop talking about how you care about
people. Show me something. Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take
responsibility.

“And,
by the way, they talk about this Great Recession if it fell out of the sky,
like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?’ It came from this man voting
to put two wars on a credit card...a prescription drug benefit on the credit
card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted
against them. I said, no, we can't afford that.

“And
now, all of a sudden, these guys are so seized with concern about the debt that
they created.”

Paul Ryan
touched all his rhetorical bases, flashing the headache-inducing Mittmatics
that obscure economic issues and try to persuade the inattentive viewer that his plan
to privatize and kill Social Security is really a brilliantly benign effort to
save it.

The
Yankees lost in extra innings and will have to keep fighting to move ahead to
what is known as the Fall Classic.

So
will Democrats.

Update:
In Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan reduces the debate from
the major leagues to the playground:

“Another
way to say it is the old man tried to patronize the kid and the kid stood his
ground. The old man pushed, and the kid pushed back.”